Category Archives: Politics

The GOP Do Over 2: Electric Boogaloo

 

18 years ago, following the dot-com implosion and rolling blackouts across the state cause my politics and not by infrastructure issues crippled California a Republican spearheaded recall election removed the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, from office. At the time and to this day I refer to this as the GOP do-over. In 2002 Davis ran and won re-election against Republican Bill Simon. It should be noted that the California GOP has last held the Governorship with Pete Wilson in the 1990 and after the anti-immigrant and arguably racist drive to pass Proposition 187 denying services to undocumented persons the Republicans have failed to win statewide offices. Simon was a particularly bad campaigner. The economic crisis of the dotcom bust, the horrid electrical supply failures, and a deeply unpopular increase in automobile registration fee gave the GOP the tools and leverage to initiate and succeed at a recall campaign. If they were unable to win a popular vote in a statewide campaign, they could possibly take the office with a mere plurality of votes in a special election. That’s exactly what happened, 55% of the voters who showed up voted for the recall, turning Davis out of office, but only 48.6% voted for the man who replaced him, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The GOP, having now even further right than before and without Arnold’s moderate stances and celebrity status they have been driven again from statewide offices, are using the COVID-19 pandemic as the crisis in their attempts to recall Governor Gavin Newsom. I have no deep well of affection for either Davis or Newsom and Newsom’s handed his political enemies numerous PR knives with which to stab him but he, nor Davis before him, has committed and abuse of office or malfeasance that warrants a recall from office. This is once again the Republicans, too far too the right to gain a majority of votes from the population, trying to secure an office that are unable to win in any general election. Reflecting the national GOP, California Republicans instead of moderating their policies and positions seek to ‘rule lawyer’ their way into power and damn the will of the people.

I urge everyone in this state to do as I am doing and voting ‘No’ on this recall.

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Quick Hits

 

Just a few unrelated thoughts and observations this morning.

 

COVID-19: Well, this is fucked. We could have been well on the way to controlling the pandemic in the US and then turning our considerable resources to helping the rest of the world, but no, our fascist-adjacent party insists on throwing their tantrum modeled upon their orange god-king and screwing it up for everyone.

 

New Novel: I’ve started act break work on my new novel about alien ‘non-contact.’ I’m hoping within a week to have an outline and to be ready for actual scene writing.

 

Marvel’s What if …: the new series an anthology of animated alternate versions of MCU stories, the premier being what is Agent Carter got the super solider serum instead of Steve. It worked but I wasn’t blown away.

 

 

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Returning to Our Winter of Discontent

 

COVID 19 cases continue to rise alarmingly fast. The United States has sufficient quantities of vaccine to immunize every single adult in the country. The right’s base, following decades of anti-science and anti-expertise propaganda follow their orange god/king with the fever of fanatics foregoing vaccination even as their elite take the shot along with their followers money.

This is the current situation in America and though last week so half-hearted and weak attempts my ‘conservative’ elites to urges their base to get vaccinated those efforts has evaporated and case rates and death continue to rise.

This is summer. People are out and about in the open air lessening the spread and still the rates are climbing fast. When winter comes and people remain indoor sharing their breathing air over and over it may be very very bad.

“Break through’ infections, infection among the vaccinated, are happening but those who have been vaccinated even if they get COVID are not winding up in the hospital or the morgue. We will lose more people, a lot more people, all the flatter a thin-skinned lying narcissist about an election he lost.

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Someone Lighted the Nut-Signal Yesterday

 

After months of anti-vaxx messaging, fear-mongering, and countless people suffering pain and death to appease a spoiled pamper man-baby in Florida ‘conservative’ news and twitter yesterday suddenly began broadcasting the urgent needs for people to be vaccinated. Tweets from the Senate minority leader, commentary from Fox News and other ‘conservative’ quarters all began singing from the same hymn.

I do not know why a sanity suddenly burst like a star flare over the right and while I expect it to fade as quickly as that flare, I still welcome it.

It’s with great doubt that I would entertain the concept that a sudden empathy for the people suffering and dying motivated these elites to urge a rational and urgently needed course of action. Yesterday’s messengers have been long vaccinated themselves against this plague and all too content to let others die slow lingering isolated deaths for brief political points making empathy an impossibly high hurdle for any sensible person’s suspension of disbelief.

No, I would look to some motivated, selfish, self-interest for the sudden, and in all likelihood, temporary change in messaging. Perhaps the growing hospitalizations has depressed fundraising and the flood of cash slowed frightening the politicians. Perhaps the suburbs fled the right even more as death and disease replaced low taxation as the most identifying aspect of the Republican party. Or maybe, just maybe, someone with a little foresight, able to peer into the misty future beyond the 24 hours news cycle understood that being anti-vaxx actually resulted in killing the very voters who would be insane enough to return them to power. Despite losing the popular vote by seven or so million the GOP lost the White House only by a margin of fifty or so thousand votes a margin easily expanded by a pandemic that concentrated itself within their base.

 

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GOP Anti-Vaxx Did Not Start with Trump

 

I am running late this morning and so this post will be shorter than most.

While (hat tip to Stephen Colbert and his writing team) The Turd Reich has certainly accelerated and amplified anti-science and anti-vaccine ideology within the GOP he did not instigate or create that movement.

Long before that terrible entrance down the tower’s escalator many within the GOP had already begun swarming to the anti-vaccine message.

Michelle Malkin championed the idiocy because the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer in women might *gasp* encourage sexual activity in girls. Better they die painfully and slowly of cancer that enjoy sexual pleasure not approved of by conservatives and the church.

Senator Rand Paul, a doctor for god’s sake, played with vaccines cause autism as a political ploy and then when called on it demanded that you believed him over the actual taped evidence.

The Delta variant, a far less entertaining variant thank any Loki, is spreading fast through the counties and districts of the country dedicated to the orange god/king and when winter arrives, I would not be surprised to see hospital in those area overwhelmed. Of course, the elites of the Turd Reich are vaccinated, they will survive the next waves like taxes it’s only little people that will die of COVID this winter.

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Stunned by Evil

 

The currently political conditions are beyond stupid, or corrupt, or evil incompetence and are transgressing into the territory that can only be called evil.

An entire political movement, devoted to a thin-skinned, orange, tantrum throwing god/king has forcefully and utterly placed itself against science, common sense, and the health and lives of its base all in the name of ‘not doing what liberals are doing.’

This pandemic has killed over six hundred thousand in the United States and despite several vaccines, produced not by miracles or divine intervention but by the hard work brilliance and education of scientific heroes, infections and deaths are beginning to against rise due the conservative crazy.

The Governor of Florida is selling campaign merchandise celebrating resistance to vaccination. Tennessee republicans have sacked the head of the health department and suspended outreach to all adolescents for ALL vaccinations, not just the COVID ones, to appease the ravenous ignorant monster of a base that they have created with decades of dedicated anti-science, anti-expertise campaigning.

All of this, this disease and death, to support what? That Former Guy who’s a cheat and swindler? To lower taxes on the uber-wealthy? To loosen gun regulations? A pistol will not save you as you die on a ventilator with your lungs shredded by a virus.

NO matter what they say, no matter what they promise, we must turn out and vote and deny the modern GOP are hint or taste or any political power or authority.

 

 

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Blue America and Plague America

 

When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic there are clearly two Americas, Blue America where vaccination rates are high and Red American where they are low.

Red America, that land where refusing to wear a mask of a symbolic gesture to show that you ‘do not live in fear’ but going everywhere armed is merely judicious judgment, has climbing cases of COVID-19 and still they refuse to get vaccinated.

This chart from the New York Times shows the absolutely clear relationship between vaccination rates and death from COVID-19.

Conservatives who would be excited beyond measure if the U.S. Supreme Court declared that ‘Constitution Carry’, the ability to carry a firearm conceal without any permitting requirements, and pack pistols before the ink was dry on the decision because they live in total terror of crime still refuse to get vaccinated. In rough figures because the data is not yet fully compiled there were about 20,000 murders in the United States last year and to date the pandemic has killed 30 times that number at more than 600,000 people. More that the US lost in World War II and Vietnam combined. Clearly saving their own lives and that of their families is not the reason that would prefer to pocket a pistol before taking the vaccine.

It is a clear indication of the madness that has taken over the conservative movement that its member would rather deal death than prevent it.

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The Pandemic is *not* Over

Things are better, we have several highly effective vaccines available to us American and it would seem that the worst is behind us.

However, this is not the time to relax our guard. Just as with any slasher movie of the 80s the villain is not yet fully dead and if we drop out weapon and stumble outside to weep, we’ll face him once more. No, we’ll not go back to the first act, but there is still death ahead.

Right now, nearly every person who dies from COVID 19 is unvaccinated and the responsibility for those unnecessary losses lie with the death-obsessed cult that the modern Republican Party.

Slavish, cultish, and idiotic devotion to a cheat, a liar, a racist, and narcissistic twice impeached former president has led vast swaths of our country to reject the simple actions that would save lives. The more votes that went for the GOP in the last election in a county the lower the rate of vaccination. More than a year of disease and death has proved inadequate to dislodging the need to prove one’s devotion to team red. Now the Delta variant is spreading quickly through the unprotected population, more contagious than the original strain it represents a serious danger to the unvaccinated and those unable to procure or accept vaccination due to their own unique health conditions. Without vaccine acquired herd immunity which Red Staters seem intent on foiling this pandemic will continue, people will die, and the only voices heard from the right will be cries of anguish over imagined crimes of Critical Race Theory.

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The Faux Patriots

 

I am a child of the Cold War; born the same year the Communist constructed the Berlin Wall. For those who are perhaps too young to know or remember the Cold War was a global struggle between the The West, The United States and her Allies, also called the Free World and The East, The USSR and her client states. (If a nation belonged to neither group it was referred to as the Third World and overwhelmingly these nations were destitute, and that label became synonymous an impoverished country.)

The Free World was hardly perfect. At the start of the Cold War the English still ruled their global Empire and the United States remained a heavily segregated nation with its large black population surviving as second-class citizens. How could this state of affairs justify the honorific ‘Free’?

The answer is that the governments of the Free World were accountable to their people. Even with the stain of America’s Jim Crow laws the free, fair, and open elections in America held the government of the United States answerable to its people. The very fact of that accountability held the seeds to the changes that destroyed Jim Crow and to this day drag us further along the road to actual justice and equality.

The Soviets and their client states held no free, fair, or open elections and were immune, until revolution, from the will of their subjects. This is the essence that separated the West from the East, the crucial factor that drove the Cold War, and fuels decades of conflict, open and clandestine, costing lives and fortunes, and held the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation over the entire world and it is this bedrock foundational principle that the Modern Republican Party has abandoned.

Make no mistake about it. The GOP as it currently stands, wedded and inseparable from Trump and his grifters unwilling to issue a party platform in its most recent presidential election favoring instead to commit itself to the ever-changing messages from its leader, has abandoned free, fair, and open elections. The Republican Party, a party that once defined itself by its opposition to the Soviet Block now openly plats to subvert election and dismiss violent attempts to prevent the transfer of authority because of a free, fair, and open election did not produce the results they desired. This, not corporate tax rates, no abortion, nor gun control, is the defining issue of our time and no person supporting the Republican party has any moral justification in calling themselves a patriot.

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Streaming Review: A Song Called Hate

 

My sweetie-wife is a fan of an Icelandic BDSM inspired metal band called Hatari. This weekend a documentary about the band’s entry into the 2019 Eurovision contest dropping on the streaming service Vimeo but region locked against the US and the UK. Luckily, I had just upgraded my Norton anti-virus subscription to include their VPN (Virtual Private Network) capability and after resetting out location to Finland managed to unlock and rent the documentary.

First time documentary director Anna Hildur follows the controversial band noted for their outspoken style as they prepare to play in Tel Aviv Israel with a clear intention to violate Eurovision’s prohibition on making any political statement as part of the contest.

As anyone who really knows me understands Metal is not one of my preferred musical genres. However, that doesn’t impede my ability to enjoy a good documentary and have respect for artists willing to risk standing and cash in order to make a stand for what they believe is right. Art, on some level, is always political. Even if an artist makes even conscious choice to avoid political statements or stands that itself is a political stand. I am not here to comment on the correctness or fallacy of Hatari’s position concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but I will respect that they did not take their position lightly or without forethought.

A Song Called Hate does a very admirable job of revealing the member of Hatari as people and moves beyond the surface level of their costumes and performance. Without having been told there was nothing about the production that would have informed me that this was a first-time feature documentary director. At 90 minutes the run time perfectly balances the need to probe deep into its subjects but without overstaying in any particular scene.

All in all, thought the music is not to my taste and I am far from equipped to judge its quality A Song Called Hate is an illuminating and well-crafted piece of documentary cinema.

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